Sam Harris Quotes

The typical person has no trouble believing without knowing. What people need to realize is simply that you do not need to believe to know.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.

If faith is what you have to go on, if faith is the link between your beliefs and the world at large, your beliefs are very likely to be wrong. Beliefs can be right or wrong. If you believe you can fly, that belief is only true if indeed you can fly. Somebody who thinks he can fly, and is wrong about it, will eventually discover there's a problem with his view of the world.

I'm a strict, strict agnostic. It's very different from a casual, 'I don't know.' It's that you cannot present as knowledge something that is not knowledge. You can present it as faith, you can present it as belief, but you can't present it as fact.

I don't believe anything till I have seen the proof. For anything without proof, I think we should believe the theory that gives us peace. It doesn't matter whether the theory is true or not.

Belief is not the beginning of knowledge - it is the end.

I don't want to believe. I want to know.

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.

I am an agnostic; I do not pretend to know what many ignorant men are sure of.

Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.

[It's] troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything. We like to pretend that our experiments define the truth for us. But that's often not the case. Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true. When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe.

Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

No amount of belief makes something a fact.

If faith is a valid tool of knowledge, then anything can be true 'by faith,' and therefore nothing is true. If the only reason you can accept a claim is by faith, then you are admitting that the claim does not stand on its own merits.

There are those, of course, who deny that they need any form of authority. They are the popular atheists and agnostics. Such men say that they must be shown by 'reason' whatever they are to accept as true. But the great thinkers among non-Christian men have taken no such position. They know that they cannot cover the whole area of reality with their knowledge.

Where doubt there truth is - 'tis her shadow.

Seeing, contrary to popular wisdom, isn't believing. It's where belief stops, because it isn't needed any more.

Truth is something that we can attempt to doubt, and then perhaps, after much exertion, discover that part of the doubt is not justified.

I can believe things that are true and things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not.

All proofs inevitably lead to propositions which have no proof! All things are known because we want to believe in them.

God forbid that Truth should be confined to Mathematical Demonstration!

People are invariably surprised to hear me say I am both an atheist and an agnostic, as if this somehow weakens my certainty. I usually reply with a question like, “Well, are you a Republican or an American?” The two words serve different concepts and are not mutually exclusive. Agnosticism addresses knowledge; atheism addresses belief. The agnostic says, “I don't have a knowledge that God exists.” The atheist says, “I don't have a belief that God exists.” You can say both things at the same time. Some agnostics are atheistic and some are theistic.

I believe science has a wonderful ability, in an unbiased way, to offer hope to many people who are confused, but it's not the only way to find hope.

We must not let go manifest truths because we cannot answer all questions about them.